[246] at the very outset, four or five well-marked characters, and afterward published some thirty-six volumes without adding another. While his work was of narrow range, however, it belonged, at its best, to a respectable order of romantic fiction. It is not a little triumph to have created even four or five types of character, or to have produced three or four strong pieces of invention. Not much more, certainly, could have been expected of a writer who not long after his first success left the West, and, somewhat later, America, never to return. Such voluntary denationalization has been not uncommon among American writers. The most striking among recent instances is that of Henry James, a man of great powers, but of a well-nigh fatal instinct for superrefinement in life and art. So subtle and detached is his later method, that it has been said of him, not unfairly, “Even his cosmopolitanism has its limitations; to be truly cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.”
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[246] at the very outset, four or five well-marked characters, and afterward published some thirty-six volumes without adding another. While his work was of narrow range, however, it belonged, at its best, to a respectable order of romantic fiction. It is not a little triumph to have created even four or five types of character, or to have produced three or four strong pieces of invention. Not much more, certainly, could have been expected of a writer who not long after his first success left the West, and, somewhat later, America, never to return. Such voluntary denationalization has been not uncommon among American writers. The most striking among recent instances is that of Henry James, a man of great powers, but of a well-nigh fatal instinct for superrefinement in life and art. So subtle and detached is his later method, that it has been said of him, not unfairly, “Even his cosmopolitanism has its limitations; to be truly cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.”
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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